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Welcome to Foliant!

Better spend one day learning to fly and get there in five minutes than walking.

Foliant is an all-in-one single-source documentation authoring tool. It lets you produce standalone documents in pdf and docx, build static websites and upload pages to Confluence, all from single Markdown source.

Foliant is a higher order tool, which means it uses other programs to do its job. For building pdf and docx, it can use Pandoc or md-to-pdf, for websites MkDocs, Aglio or Slate.

Foliant preprocessors let you reuse parts of your documents, show and hide content with flags, render diagrams from text, and much more.

Foliant is highly extensible, so if it lacks some functions or output formats you can always make a plugin for it or request one from our team.

Logo made by Hand Drawn Goods from flaticon.com.

Who Is It for?

You’ll love Foliant if you:

  • need to ship documentation as pdf, docx, and websites
  • want to use Markdown with consistent extension system instead of custom syntax for every new bit of functionality
  • like reStructuredText’s extensibility and AsciiDoc’s flexibility, but would rather use Markdown
  • want a tool that you can extend with custom plugins without dealing with something as over-engineered as Sphinx
  • want to work with docs as code and make them a part of your CI pipeline
  • have a lot of segregated repositories with sources of your documents and want to standardize the documentation approach.

Changelog

Here is the changelog of Foliant Core, the main and only strictly required package. See also the history of releases of numerous Foliant extensions.

1.0.13

  • Add the clean_registry function to make. This function checks if multiproject and removes .apirefregistry files in .multiprojectache.

1.0.12

  • Add the disable_implicit_unescape option. Remove warning when escape_code is not set.
  • Support the !env YAML tag to use environment variables in the project config.
  • Allow to specify custom directory to store logs with the --logs|-l command line option.
  • Flush output to STDOUT in progress status messages and in the foliant.utils.output() method.
  • Get and log the names and versions of all installed Foliant-related packages.
  • Do not raise exception of the same type that is raised by a preprocessor, raise RuntimeError instead because some exceptions take more arguments than one.

1.0.11

  • Allow to specify custom options for EscapeCode preprocessor as the escape_code.options config parameter value.
  • Pass the quiet flag to BaseParser() as an optional argument for using in config extensions.

1.0.10

  • Add escape_code config option. To use it, escapecode and unescapecode preprocessors must be installed.

1.0.9

  • Process attribute values of pseudo-XML tags as YAML.
  • Allow single quotes for enclosing attribute values of pseudo-XML tags.
  • Add !project_path and !rel_path YAML tags.

1.0.8

  • Restore quiet mode.
  • Add the output() method for using in preprocessors.

1.0.7

  • Remove spinner made with Halo.
  • Abolish quiet mode because it is useless if extensions are allowed to write anything to STDOUT.
  • Show full tracebacks in debug mode; write full tracebacks into logs.

1.0.6

  • CLI: If no args are provided, print help.
  • Fix tags searching pattern in _unescape preprocessor.

1.0.5

  • Allow to override default config file name in CLI.
  • Allow multiline tags. Process true and false attribute values as boolean, not as integer.
  • Add tests.
  • Improve code style.

1.0.4

  • Breaking change. Add logging to all stages of building a project. Config parser extensions, CLI extensions, backends, and preprocessors can now access self.logger and create child loggers with self.logger = self.logger.getChild('newbackend').
  • Add pre backend with pre target that applies the preprocessors from the config and returns a Foliant project that doesn't require any preprocessing.
  • make now returns its result, which makes is easier to call it from extensions.

1.0.3

  • Fix critical issue when config parsing would fail if any config value contained non-latin characters.

1.0.2

  • Use README.md as package description.

1.0.1

  • Fix critical bug with CLI module caused by missing version definition in the root __init__.py file.

1.0.0

  • Complete rewrite.
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